Welcome to day 2 of Killer Christmas, which may or may not stick as the title of a series of posts about Christmas horror, but here we are. Where are we exactly?

We are in Hell.

Hell.

Or at least I am, because I spent 130 minutes watching Nightmare on 34th Street (2023) and the best thing I can say about this movie is that it’s over.

Nightmare on 34th Street is your basic “deranged failed children’s entertainer who comes from a long line of deranged Norwegian ventriloquist/children’s entertainers who are beholden to a demonic snowman puppet” anthology film.

This post doesn’t contain any spoilers, but it probably should.

The frame story involves the aforementioned Henry, who wears a Santa suit and invades homes in his small British village to tell children stories. This is ostensibly the framing narrative for an anthology that has at least one and possibly two additional frame stories outside or maybe within Henry’s frame story and how the fuck do you mess up a structure as basic as an anthology of short films around a theme as broad as Christmas with the tried and true framing narrative format of an adult telling kids 4 stories related to Christmas?

Look, I have a pretty strict rule about not shitting on indie or low budget movies for a cheap laugh. Movies that are intentionally craptacular like SyFy Originals? Sure, let’s snark! We’re all in on the joke! Hollywood mega-flops? Those babies are always fair game. But low-budget indies? I try really hard to approach them with charity and kindness because whoa baby, someone finished a feature film and put it out into the cruel world to distract us from our lives for an hour or two!

And I can take a lot. I went to film school. I taught sound for film. I’ve juried film festivals. I understand that film is a collaborative medium with a nearly infinite number of opportunities to spiral utterly out of control. I’ve seen films so bad they defy description. I’ve worked on films so bad they defy description.

I saw Cats. In the theater. More than once. On purpose.

I watched the Star Wars Holiday Special yesterday. Twice. On purpose.

And yet, Nightmare on 34th Street nearly broke me. It is with genuine sadness that I report that I found this film not terrible enough to be compelling, not boring enough to sleep through, and without the sincere ineptitude that can make a turkey enjoyably rewatchable. If you ever wondered how to make a slasher that’s violent and enthusiastically thematic but with an emotional palette that runs the gamut from saliva to beige, this is the movie for you!

But not for anyone else.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that I do not recommend this movie.

About 20 minutes into this flick I went outside to get the mail and had such a long conversation with my neighbor’s dog that my neighbor actually handed me the leash, went home, put their laundry in the dryer, and then came back to reclaim their dog.

At this point I thought I just wasn’t focused enough, so I got a cup of coffee and ran the movie back to the point I went walkabout.

20 minutes later I was laying on my living room floor reciting Clark Griswold’s “Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?” monologue from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Out loud. To myself. Just to break up the monotony.

Somewhere around the ninety minute mark I realized I was wandering around my house carrying a houseplant like it was a fussy baby. I can’t explain when I picked up the plant or why I thought it was going to ease my agony, but I’d vowed to see this thing through and apparently carrying around a ficus made sense?

The audio crapped out just as the clock neared the end of the 2nd hour. It was a Christmas Miracle!

I’m fairly certain I did some astral projecting during the final 15 minutes. And then I wandered off to get more coffee and forgot the movie was even running.

I probably would have just deleted my notes but then I searched and saw this title on some lists of new VOD holiday horror with nary a warning that Writer-Director-Producer James Crow shit the bed with this one. Crow actually seems to have potential, but sweet cheezits, if you’re going to pick a recent Holiday Horror flick to spend your precious time on, save this one for when you have a cold because maybe some Nyquil* will quiet the part of your brain that demands a semblance of logic.

Horror anthologies aren’t rare, and they often have a (single) frame in which an adult tells a series of stories to a child. I have a round-up post for next week about some Christmas horror titles, so I won’t get into the weeds here, other than to say that anthologies offer an opportunity to experiment with different techniques or styles or tones, or to string together shorter narratives that might not work on their own or have enough narrative heft to warrant being a standalone feature. But that sort of experimentation is generally understood to take place from story to story and differentiate them from one another. The way elements such as animated sequences, flashbacks, and hallucinations (maybe?) are used throughout this movie across the different stories is confounding. This is unfortunate not only because it makes it harder to keep track of where we are inside the frame(s), but because the animation had verve and comedic-horror timing that was so promising.

But, alas.

In the category of “words I never thought I’d write,” this movie could have used some expository dialogue early on because what, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the fuck?

I’m not saying that Crow should try to salvage this stinker, but honestly, the audio is probably fixable and some judicious editing could address the structural flaws and tedious killer-ventriloquist-daddy issues and reduce what feels like a truly punishing run-time in relation to the material. That said, the stereotypical depictions of mental illness and the peculiar fixation with facial disfigurement would require pretty vigorous intervention.

The movie opens with a family being slaughtered by a trio of escaped serial killers, then jumps 5 years to the same killers returning to slaughter the new owners of the house. The killers all have facial injuries and scars, a trope with a long damaging history. Throughout the film, the killers inflict grievous injuries to their victims’ faces. If Crow was attempting to attach some sort of significance to this or it was explained in Henry’s muddy backstory, I missed it. If you know what’s up with this, do me a favor: don’t send me those notes.**

*Don’t do drugs, stay in school. Etc. Etc.

**I 100% stole that joke from The Office’s Dunder-Mifflin CFO/serial killer, David Wallace, who was obviously the Scranton Strangler. But that’s a post for another day.